The Movie Set That Ate Itself

The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine about three years ago: A young Russian film director has holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country’s east, making…something. A movie, sure, but not just that. If the gossip was to be believed, this was the most expansive, complicated, all-consuming film project ever attempted.

Source: GQ
Published: Nov 1, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,336 words)

Peyton’s Place

For the last several years, the big ticket in town has been the teen melodrama One Tree Hill, which was on the WB and is now on the CW Network. Don’t let the off brands fool you, though; a surprising number of people watch it, maybe even you, for all I know. It’s one of the worst TV shows ever made, and I seriously do not mean that as an insult. It’s bad in the way that Mexican TV is bad, superstylized bad. Good bad. Indeed, there are times when the particular campiness of its badness, although I can sense its presence, is in fact beyond me, beyond my frequency, like that beep you play on the Internet that only kids can hear. Too many of my camp-receptor cells have died. Possibly One Tree Hill is a work of genius. Certainly it is about to go nine seasons, strongly suggesting that the mother of its creator, Mark Schwahn, did not give birth to any idiots, or if she did those people are Schwahn’s siblings. The One Tree character who supposedly lived in our house was Peyton, played by one of the stars, Hilarie Burton, a striking bone-thin blonde. Think coppery curls. I’d seen her on MTV right at the moment when I was first feeling too old to watch MTV. Superfriendly when we met her, superfriendly always.

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 17, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,692 words)

The Man Who Sailed His House

Two days after the Japanese tsunami, after the waves had left their destruction, as rescue workers searched the ruins, news came of an almost surreal survival: Miles out at sea, a man was found, alone, riding on nothing but the roof of his house. “And that’s when you know you’ve been caught out, that you’ve squandered what time you had, that you must trust this house of concrete you’ve built to stand up to the sea. Your wife joins you on the second-floor terrace, reporting that she, too, saw the neighbor’s house wash away. ‘We should run,’ she says, but you say, ‘It’s too late.’ And then: ‘We’ll be fine.’ Her arms circle your waist and lock there, while you stand stock-straight, gazing at the mountain, without daring to look back at the sea. These will be your last words to her—We’ll be fine. And you’ve already departed your body when everything seems to break beneath your feet and a roaring force crashes over you.”

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 13, 2011
Length: 29 minutes (7,495 words)

The Arrival of LL Cool J

Adam Horovitz: He was a kid. He had the classic early eighties b-boy look: tight Lee jeans, adidas shell toes, fat laces going up the leg, a Kangol, Cazals, a Le Tigre shirt. And LL was just like, “Who are these people? What’s up with these white boys?” Not only that, but Rick was in this weird dorm room. I’m assuming LL expected it to be an office with a secretary and coffee—like on TV. He was just shocked. It was really funny.

LL Cool J: When Rick came downstairs, the first thing I said was, “Yo, you Rick?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “I thought you was black.” He said, “Cool.”

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 4, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,170 words)

Hecho en America

Wash the apple before you bite into it, because that’s the way you were raised. Germs, pesticides, dirt, gunk, it doesn’t matter—just wash it. The fingerprints, too, go down the drain with the rest. It’s easy to forget that there are people who harvest our food. Sometimes, maybe, we are reminded of the seasons and the sun and the way of the apple tree, and if we multiply that by millions of apple trees, times millions of tomato plants, times all the other fruits and vegetables, we realize, holy potato chips, that’s a lot of picking. Without 1 million people on the ground, on ladders, in bushes—armies of pickers swooping in like bees—all the tilling, planting, and fertilizing of America’s $144 billion horticultural production is for naught. The fruit falls to the ground and rots.

Source: GQ
Published: Sep 24, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,507 words)

Lars Attacks!

“Ayee-eeee…” Lars von Trier says, physically wincing, as it begins. (His ramblings are prompted by a question partly inquiring about the interest he had expressed to a Danish film magazine about the Nazi aesthetic and their achievements in the field of design.) “Yeah, okay. I remember that…” He asks me to stop it for a moment, then continues. “Terrible…” He sees the distressed look on Dunst’s face, helpless to stop the flow of disastrous words from the mouth of someone inches away from her. “I kind of didn’t look at her,” he remembers. “But I had a feeling that she was kind of reacting. But then I thought ‘Ah, these Americans, they’re always so scared of everything, you know…’ ” Just watching Dunst’s face, as it shifts between amusement, concern, bafflement, horror, compassion, and pain, without ever losing its dignity, tells you as much about what is happening as Trier’s words do.

Source: GQ
Published: Sep 20, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,913 words)

The Girl from Trails End

In a small, rough-edged town not far from Houston, nineteen men and boys await trial for unspeakable acts—the repeated gang rape of an 11-year-old girl. Good god, you think: How could so many men treat a child so brutally? And how could so many people leap to their defense? “Seven of the adults had criminal records or charges pending. … The weight of their individual experiences—sexually, criminally, even their high school education and their work experience, fatherhood, lives already on the skid or in frustrating limbo—all of this put these men years and years ahead of a sixth grader. Compared to her, they had a terrible gravity.”

Source: GQ
Published: Sep 6, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,657 words)

Tell

As Don’t Ask Don’t Tell comes to an end, interviews with dozens of gay servicemen about their experience. Air Force #3: “I’ve had three deployments [while] with the same person. Every time it’s been ‘All right, see you later.’ All the spouses get together, do stu. He’s just there by himself, fending for himself.” Marines #2: “The relationship lasted for about four years, but I always felt like I was disrespecting him, to have to pretend he didn’t exist when I went to work. When I got deployed, he was there with my family when I left. It kind of sucked—to shake his hand and a little pat on the back and ‘I’ll see you when I see you’ kind of thing. And when you’re getting ready to come back, the spouses were getting classes—here’s how you welcome your Marine back into the family—and my boyfriend didn’t get any of that.”

Source: GQ
Published: Aug 25, 2011
Length: 34 minutes (8,563 words)

Diner for Schmucks

Which brings me to M. Wells, a metal-clad diner as shiny as a magpie’s trinket, situated on a corner in Queens as dead-drab as one of the borough’s countless cemeteries. A little more than a year ago, the diner was an abandoned shell, and now it symbolizes the renewal of Long Island City as surely as the MoMA PS1 art museum and the Silvercup film studios. I don’t know what a burger once cost at the derelict diner that became M. Wells, since I never ate there, but I’m betting it was about $2.99. M. Wells sells one for $42, proof that gentrification is thriving in Queens. … My experience there was like no other. The motto is “All’s well at M. Wells.” I assure you it is not.

Source: GQ
Published: Aug 16, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,637 words)

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s…Some Dude?!

Phoenix didn’t know this when he first donned the suit about a year ago, but he’s one of around 200 real-life superheroes currently patrolling America’s streets, looking for wrongs to right. There’s DC’s Guardian, in Washington, who wears a full-body stars-and-stripes outfit and wanders the troubled areas behind the Capitol building. There’s RazorHawk, from Minneapolis, who was a pro wrestler for fifteen years before joining the RLSH movement. There’s New York City’s Dark Guardian, who specializes in chasing pot dealers out of Washington Square Park by creeping up to them, shining a light in their eyes, and yelling, “This is a drug-free park!” And there are dozens and dozens more. Few, if any, are as daring as Phoenix. Most undertake basically safe community work: helping the homeless, telling kids to stay off drugs, etc. They’re regular men with jobs and families and responsibilities who somehow have enough energy at the end of the day to journey into America’s neediest neighborhoods to do what they can.

Author: Jon Ronson
Source: GQ
Published: Aug 10, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,200 words)